


Jaya at Rise

by yuutsuhime



Series: 東港 | Higashiminato [7]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Abusive Parents, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Biracial Character, Bullying, Character Study, Divorce, Experimental Style, Gen, High School, Implied/Referenced Sexual Assault, Japanese-American Character, Lesbian Character, Minor Character Death, Obsessive Behavior, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rural Japan, Screenplay/Script Format, Self-Harm, Sexual Confusion, Slice of Life, Suicide by Train, 物の哀れ | Mono No Aware
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-30
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2020-10-20 08:36:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 5,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20672441
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuutsuhime/pseuds/yuutsuhime
Summary: A series of vignettes about a 16-year old girl stuck between high school and graduation; and her reflections on trauma, bullying, death, and queerness.





	1. Manifesto

**Author's Note:**

> Written throughout a difficult time in my life (ostensibly incomplete, but I also can't complete it since my life has changed significantly).
> 
> Jaya is 16.

Sometimes I thought about how only I knew what Priya's shoulder blades looked like when she took off her bra, how everything was disarray and old _tatami_ mats and crickets and the almost undetectable smell of a worn-out air conditioner filter. It was my childhood room and my grandmother was downstairs – _Jaya, help me with the dishes, would you_ she'd said later, after dinner, and Priya and I had touched hands accidentally in the kitchen sink and laughed again, more awkwardly. After that, we saw each other in school, sometimes.

_Higashiko_ is a small town packed into a rural cove on the edge of _Honshu_, on the end of a local train line that, after an hour and a half on clear days, ends up in _Kamakura_. I've memorized most of the local plant foliage through sheer boredom staring out the window on the way to school. The last time Priya and I were together on the train I'd pointed out that the advertisements on the roof of the car had changed for the first time in three months, and now us backwards locals had finally been civilised by the concept of toothpaste. Priya had turned back to her phone and started complaining about how Lauren from Switzerland wanted to have a movie-and-_karaoke_ night downtown with the rest of the foreign exchange students. I let the rhythmic noise of the train surround me.

People accuse me of being emotionally distant, and maybe that's true. Takao, who had three brothers, had started a campaign to prove that I actually wasn't a robot; this included giving me his then seventh-grade brother's math homework and declaring it _impossible_ that I had actually solved it, prodding me with a stick, and eventually pinning me down on the playground and scratching me with his fingernails until he drew blood. _Wow, it's so realistic_, he'd remarked, and went on to share the color of my panties with the rest of the boys in the grade. At some point in sixth grade I started staring at my body in the mirror; it started with ideas – that maybe, if I carved down deep enough I could find some of the metal and electronics the boys were talking about. I went over the scratches Takao left with my own ragged fingernails until I couldn't tell where they had originally been. The adults called this _dermatillomania_; I called it self-discovery, in the same way that I stared in that mirror, my legs spread apart, peering from every angle to make sure nobody could see past my underwear.

Now, in the twelfth grade, Takao is seventeen and has a girl pregnant. Another, he fed a cupcake laced with his own semen; another, he was suspended with for smoking pot in the gender-neutral bathroom. I know this because I found the burnt remains of his blunts, nestled under the toilet, directly between my legs. Priya thinks he's funny, laughs at his antics and how confidently he flaunts his dick under his basketball shorts. I don't think she's heard the rumors yet.

The last time Priya and I were on the train together, all I could think about were the sounds of collisions I'd heard. The summer after sixth grade – a deer walks in front of the train, leaving bloody spiderweb cracks across the windshield (later that night, I discovered that I could not bury all of a body, and left with my shoes bloody). Winter of my sophomore year – two women in the first car scream, a mangled bicycle sparks across a rainy street, a briefcase spills its insides into view (for the next year, I collected loose paper on the street to fold into origami cranes). All of them, sickening thuds that began with a train and ended with blisters on my hands.

That was when my grandmother started talking about mental illness and mania; accusing me with evidence from my own body: the bags under my eyes, the perfectly folded, bloodied white paper cranes strung and piled in a corner of my room like snowdrifts. Her motherly concern stung like needles, and I made up some excuse – the cranes were a present for my mom once she finishes rehab, they were a wish that my dad could come visit us both next summer – and my grandmother smiled thinly.

And, so I turned sixteen on January 21st, 2012, in the midst of the memories Priya left imprinted in the space of my bedroom, with 883 paper cranes strung from the ceiling, my black-painted nails chipped and scabbed, with five hours left to sleep before I caught the train to school.


	2. Routine


    SETTING
    The first-floor kitchen of an upper-middle class western-style home in Japan.
    
    AT RISE
    **Jaya** sits in one of three empty chairs at the kitchen table.
    
    _Jaya looks across the dim kitchen, lit only by the streetlights reflecting off freshly fallen snow. She does not turn the lights on, and proceeds to pour cereal by the light of the refrigerator._
    
    JAYA
    _(aside)_ Good morning.
    
    _She switches on the television, rubbing sleep from her eyes. Jaya has chronic insomnia. Sometimes, she wakes in the night, anticipating shouting, even though her father has moved to Seattle and forgets his weekly Skype call. She realizes he has forgotten again, and checks her phone._
    
    JAYA'S FATHER
    _(recording)_ Hey, I'm sorry. You know how it is, a meeting went long again – look, I hope you're not mad –
    
    _Jaya stops the recording.
    
    Looking around, she sees a new cluster of empty beer bottles near the sink. She makes a mental note to throw them in the recycling on her way out the door. She no longer hates the smell of alcohol. This has all become normal._
    

I've been thinking about taking up smoking just to spite all the other people in my life. It would make the difference between standing around awkwardly and standing around being cool. It would mask the smell of vomit on my clothes and help my throat relax. The air temperature is hovering around zero Celsius, so I can at least see my breath and pretend.

The winding streets on the mountain are still treacherous with ice; they mostly get used for foot traffic in the winter, and the Port Authority opens up the parking lot down by the train station instead, so nobody has to drive on the ice. This is what us locals jokingly refer to as "downtown": a train station with analog timetables from the 70s, a larger cabin-like tourist-bureau-slash-restaurant-slash-police-station-slash-port-headquarters, a parking lot, and a concrete beachfront littered with rusting construction equipment and old fishing boats. It's small enough that I can imagine myself walking through all the astral paths my body left there previously. Here's the crack I've tripped over twice (once spilling coffee, once scraping my knee), here's the bench I sat on after I waved good-bye to Dad, here's the corner my mother took me to to yell at me – I can't remember what for.
    
    
    PRIYA
    _(to Jaya)_ Why do you let your mother hit you?
    
    JAYA
    Just happens.
    
    _Jaya looks away._
    

My teacher, Mr. Sakamoto, asked me about college again. It's probably more fair to say he _told_ me about college in the context of this looming future that he and I were both uncertain about. For me, college was just another part of the railroad, and I was just riding on a train, and there was no sense asking if I wanted to be on board – I didn't have a choice. It was just how the script of my life had been laid out.
    
    
    MR. SAKAMOTO
    _(to Jaya)_ Your grades have been falling steadily – if you don't take this seriously, where will you end up? You'll let your parents down.
    
    JAYA
    _(mumbles)_ I don't know.
    
    _Mr. Sakamoto hands Jaya a test paper. He has written advice on both sides, in red pen. Jaya recycles the test on her way out the classroom door._
    

I stand at my usual spot on the train platform, just behind the tattered old advertisements on their rusty billboards. I'm wearing a long black coat and a black beret; not necessarily invisible, but more like a smudge; an indeterminate being, a shadow.

Sometimes, I think about walking to the train station without a coat on. I'd wear just a crop top and a short skirt and I'd make a fashion statement to all the elderly people in their houses on the mountain and downtown and on the train. I'd show them how cold this town was with my own skin, and when I reached Tokyo, I'd fit right in. Every shiver would be an act of resistance. It would be another step towards Jaya, the concept, rather than Jaya, the existence.
    
    
    SETTING
    The local train, somewhere between Yokohama and Tokyo.
    
    AT RISE
    The popular girls, Sayaka, Tomoe, and Haruka stand in a group near one of the doors. Jaya stands in a corner near the door on the other side.
    
    SAYAKA
    _(looking at Jaya)_ Isn't that the girl who brought a knife to school?
    
    HARUKA
    She's the one who _likes_ you, right?
    
    _They giggle amongst themselves. Jaya looks out the window, adjusting her earbuds. She does not usually listen to music, but she looks through her playlist for heavy metal._
    

I guess Jaya, the concept, is the kind of person who would change the status quo. She's the one who would look all the scripted, copied-and-pasted events of her life and say no, this isn't enough.
    
    
    SETTING
    The front entrance of a high school somewhere deep in the urban sprawl between Yokohama and Tokyo.
    
    AT RISE
    A number of students file in through the main gate. Jaya walks quickly, faster than the others, along the side of the path.
    
    _A student laughs loudly, and Jaya turns around, startled._
    
    STUDENT
    _(to Jaya)_ What are you looking at?
    
    JAYA
    _(looking down)_ Sorry.
    

Contrary to the _anime_ stereotype, I don't sit in the back corner of the classroom next to the window. I'm stuck in between Sayaka and Tomoe, and it's clear that I'm an obstacle to their conversation. Sometimes I sit up straighter, as if my head and body will block their conversation from each other, but other times I put my head down and let the banality of their friendship wash over me.
    
    
    MR. SAKAMOTO
    _(taking attendance)_ Haruhara.
    
    JAYA
    Present.
    

Well, more or less present. Like how a rock might be present in an otherwise perfectly good ocean photograph. Like how a psychological basket case might be present in an otherwise functional classroom. Mr. Sakamoto used to _try_, before he gave up and blamed me for being too difficult to fix. It was worrisome, he said, that I chose to eat lunch under the stairwell outside the cafeteria or in the gender-neutral bathroom; then it just became _lazy_ and _giving up_ and _reflective of your grades_ and he'd give me more notes to bring home to my mother that I instead fed to the recycling bin on the platform at _Kamakura_.
    
    
    MR. SAKAMOTO
    _(taking attendance)_ Rao.
    
    PRIYA
    Here!
    

Even after two months I couldn't justify to myself why I couldn't reciprocate. The internet talked about aromanticism in a way vastly different from our 1988 school psychology textbooks and neither justified why I masturbated so frequently. If I was a guy it would probably just have been normal, like Takao. Like a one night stand at the end of a few months of tenuous friendship. Priya used to sit with me under the stairs at lunch and we'd talk about things she liked, like stories of murder and rape and the mythical suicide forest. This too was routine, until it wasn't.


	3. Paper Cranes

I folded my 900th paper crane in the dark, crouched in the corner of my room where moonlight streamed through the crack in the curtains.

My grandmother had always believed in mythology. Not mythology as we'd study from Euro-centric books, but the mythology that was quietly embedded in magical realist stories from when I was a baby. One of those myths was that the person who folds one thousand paper cranes is granted a wish, which was popularized by the life of Sadako Sasaki. It was total bullshit, but I'd folded nine hundred of them anyway – well, according to my physical count. I'd probably folded over ten thousand but I kept throwing them out before I reached a thousand. This was in part by the advice of the school counselor, a woman who smelt of bureaucracy and hard candy, who characterized my origami as "obsessive" and "manic" before I opted out of visits.

Folding a thousand cranes was a huge burden because the metaphysics of how the wish operated were ill defined. Once I folded nine-hundred and ninety-nine and hesitated on the last one. What if the spirits weren't paying attention? What if I wasn't as pure of heart and mind as they expected? Of course the paper crane spirits had to reject _some_ wishes, or else any self-serving asshole could gain undeserved power or cause a paradox that destroys God. So I took apart all of the cranes and started again. It usually took me about a week to fold them all.

The actual papers I use are either temporary placeholders or actual things of importance. Notes home about my behavior from Mr. Sakamoto, originally discarded in the recycling, appear here and there, the pen ink folded and smudged into obscurity. There's the one letter dad wrote back before he decided we should use Skype instead. There's a couple papers I caught blowing in the wind the night after the incident with the train and the bicycle. All of the papers have, inevitably, become smudged with blood caused by another "compulsion" to bite my cuticles, and I eventually folded the most important papers into a string of core cranes that I never disassembled.

They said Sadako used things like medical wrappers and napkins to fold her cranes, and I suppose unfolding her work would reveal a sort of hidden journal of medications and events. Maybe the folds could be traced to her emotional state – was she tired? Hyperfocused? Trembling?

I decided not to write a text journal because of this. What reminders I did need, I wrote on my hands in ballpoint pen, and they faded away down the shower drain when it was time.

I folded the first paper crane on the night of the second collision, the one where it was finally a man and not a wild animal. I felt immense shame searching for papers, under the suspicious eye of the police officers and the irritated glares of the diverted traffic. I ran about in the evening mist like a street urchin, peering into cracks and grates and anywhere stray papers could have stuck. _It's dangerous for you to play here_, an officer eventually said. It was awkward and infantilizing and I knew he was trying to present a fatherly attitude. _Where are your parents? Do they know you're here?_ They didn't, and by the time I slunk home with my torn, pathetic, gruesome trophy my mother had ceased caring about where I was and had gone to sleep.

The paper is simple. It's a hole-punched sheet of college-ruled notebook paper that contains a scribbled note in black ballpoint pen: "Shiina, Yokohama" and then an obscured telephone number beginning "4577". With six digits obscured, I'd have to try one million different numbers, but the geographic code '45' does correspond to Yokohama, so either Shiina was telling the truth or put effort into choosing a fake number. It's hardly even clear that this paper came from the briefcase that exploded out of the bicyclist's hands when the train struck him. This thought has kept me awake at night, and I still catch myself poking and kicking objects around whenever I'm waiting for a train, hoping some of his papers blew that many miles in the years since his death.

The police called it suicide. The name was never reported, only the train delays, and the rest of society moved on. I still wonder if Shiina did.
    
    
    4577-00-3072
    Matsumoto speaking.
    
    JAYA
    _(startled)_
    Hello, I'm looking for Shiina?
    
    4577-00-3072
    Sorry, there's no Shiina living here. Do you –
    
    _Jaya hangs up the phone, crosses out a number on a sheet of paper, and dials the phone._
    
    4577-00-3073
    _(answering machine)_ This number is not in service. If you –
    
    _Jaya hangs up again and dials the next number._
    
    4577-00-3074
    _(answering machine)_ This number is not –
    
    _Jaya hangs up again._
    
    4577-00-3075
    _(answering machine)_ This number –
    
    _Jaya hangs up, stretches her back, and deftly folds four paper cranes, setting them gently on the floor next to the telephone receiver. Satisfied with her work, she picks the handset back up and continues dialing._
    

I turn the new nine-hundredth paper crane around in my hands, shining moonlight on each of its folds. Its wing has the numbers 4577-00-0095, 4577-00-1242, and 4577-00-1966 written in three different colors of marker, all crossed out. A piece of my journal. An obsession.


	4. Knife

I don't have a Facebook, but it became clear through the aether of the classroom that Tomoe had tagged me as the most likely person in school to become a serial killer. I skipped most of first period to sulk in the neutral and practice flipping my switchblade around in the mirror.

Of course it was illegal to have a switchblade at school, and probably illegal in general for a person my age. I'd taken it out of a box of my grandfather's old things that my grandmother kept packed in the shed. My grandfather had died about three years ago after ailing until he shat himself nearly every day. He used to be an amateur martial artist and soccer player and my grandmother made deliberate decisions to remind us of his strength. His shrine was lined with black-and-white pictures of him, young, black-haired and smooth-skinned, often shirtless and beaming with health, and everything that didn't fit that narrative was piled into his shed and forgotten. His knife was in his toolbox, under a toilet seat support system and a couple boxes of adult diapers.

Even though the knife is my grandfather's, it feels like he bequeathed it to me in some way. It was some rare shard of his masculinity and health, hidden away in a box of tools he'd lost the ability to use, hidden further below the remnants of his old age. I'd watched him build things with those tools – chicken coops, benches, house repairs – and I tried to help on multiple occasions, always being admonished for being unsafe. _Don't put your hand in there, it could be cut_, he'd warn, and now that he was dead and unable to stop me, I'd taken the very thing that he was warning me about. Maybe it was a coming of age thing. Maybe I wanted a piece of who he was, so I could protect myself. Maybe it's because he was nothing like my dad.

Jaya, the concept, would have gone up to Tomoe's desk and asked something bold and brash like "How many people do you think I've killed", or "So do you think you're next?", but instead I put my schoolgirl uniform back on and attended second period. The knife secured in my bra was the only thing reminding me that I was, thankfully, not normal.


	5. Tomatoes

My mother had purchased some produce from the grocery store and left it on the counter, as if to indicate that she'd also be eating whatever I cooked for myself. I've probably become discreet enough to not make her _look like a bad mother_ whenever purposeful accidents happen with sharp objects in the kitchen, but then again I suppose she's used to consuming my blood. That's what it always comes down to, is the flesh; the _I created you_, the physicality and growth of my body from my parents' cum.

It's not like my mother needed to buy tomatoes. In the summer she had gone outside into my father's old garden with a bandana and a yellow bin and set to work, and when I came home she'd playfully thrown a ripe tomato at me. _Just doing some yard work_, she'd said, as if it was normal. I'd smiled and laughed and gone inside to quietly have a breakdown over a fucking plant that I couldn't protect, and later when we sat together at dinner we'd eaten spaghetti with sauce that didn't come from my father's tomato plant while she talked about how she was _glad that was gone_. Later that night I slunk out into the garage to pick through the remains and wasted food and wasted love, and I supposed that this was something that I had created with _my_ own flesh, too, and didn't I own it, the way my mother claimed to own me?

The first time I'd accidentally let her see a cut, she'd wrenched my arm away from my body into the space between us, and said, _what is this? You're making me look like a bad mother_. And when she'd come out into the yard, hearing my footsteps as I investigated the crime scene in the yellow bucket, she'd pointed a flashlight at me and said the same. _Why aren't you in bed like a normal child?_ She'd led me back into the house by the wrist, and I didn't even say anything.
    
    
    PRIYA
    _(to Jaya)_ Oh my god, are you a cutter?
    

When I cut fruits, I always make sure to memorize the patterns of the flesh. Which bits have the most juice in them that could spill and get everywhere. Sometimes, I make a game out of predicting what the next layer will look like. Sometimes, you have to get in close to make sure the slices are spaced just right.
    
    
    PRIYA
    _(to Jaya)_ You're honestly one of the only people I know who can pull off full-length gloves.
    
    _Jaya rolls up her sleeve, to reveal black-and-white forearm-length gloves, decorated with animal skull patterns._
    
    JAYA
    Yeah.
    

How often is it that I use my mother's knives to prepare things for her palate, for her to consume? How much of this flesh will she claim as her own?
    
    
    JAYA'S FATHER
    _(on a Skype call)_ So, are you taking care of my garden?
    
    _Jaya's father flashes a winning smile. The connection is stuttering._
    
    JAYA
    Doing my best.
    


	6. Floor

Sometimes I'd curl up on the tiles where Kuro used to lie when we were taking care of him. It was cold down there among the shoes and cobwebs and it made me feel more human than the dull heat in the rest of the house. Sometimes I'd walk down the halls and up the stairs and see all the growing up I'd left behind, and I'd feel small and shrunken inside myself, like child me was trying to walk sideways in a different direction with more energy than this body could ever have had. My mother took the third air conditioner into her room in the same sentence that she told me to shower all the sweat off my body – _what's that on your shirt_, she'd asked, knowing full well it was my armpit sweat, and that we both knew she'd gotten close enough to smell it. She needed the cool for her depression, she'd said, _makes me calm down, so I'm probably more fun to be around_. That was a threat.

Jaya the Concept was not a dog, but Jaya the Concept did enjoy being called a bitch, a cunt, a Jezebel; any girl words that came out of men's mouths smelling of salt and defeat. Jaya the Concept could make their mouths into wounds for those few seconds, like on the station at _Shinjuku_ on Thursday after school: he'd come up to me, asked if I was wearing panties under my skirt and in that moment I became the bitch, and then I was the bitch taking up the train restroom for twenty minutes thinking about her body.

Kuro was my grandfather's last dog, a twelve year-old Yorkshire terrier that had worn a beige cycling cap about as much as my grandfather did, who limped when he walked. It had been several years now – since he died. My grandfather, I mean. He was the kind of man who'd pick me up at _Shinjuku_ after school in an air-conditioned pickup truck when my mother was busy. It was this kind of normalcy; the hour-long drive that eventually became the same, averaged out. The next spring the ruts his pickup truck dug in the driveway started to fill in with weeds, and that's when I knew he was gone.

Kuro was afraid of loud noises, so we spent time together. He'd memorize the texture of my hands and arms; I'd memorize the smells from the underside of plywood furniture and crusted snow melt. I wondered how the people in the house were still my parents, and how their marriage had ended up with so much broken glass.
    
    
    SETTING
    The floor.
    
    AT RISE
    Jaya lays with her grandfather's dog, Kuro.
    
    JAYA'S MOTHER
    _(storming past)_ Don't you dare look at me. This is _not_ about you, this time.
    
    JAYA'S FATHER
    _(unintelligible)_
    
    JAYA'S MOTHER
    Do _not_ make this about _my_ daughter. I don't care what she says about you. Do you think she loves you?
    

The echoes of those arguments had carved themselves in to this place, defacing the walls more than my crayons ever had. I remembered our living room, still carpeted, light streaming through; how I only used the scissors to cut paper.
    
    
    JAYA'S MOTHER
    She used to be so happy, and _now_ look what you've done.
    
    JAYA'S FATHER
    _(unintelligible)_
    

I think anything that had been in that house understood how strong a whisper could be.


	7. Essay

Priya and I both knew about each others' writing. We no longer talked to each other but things could be overheard, and others were required to be shared. Priya was writing about mass shootings in America and I was writing about something I didn't care about.
    
    
    Haruhara, Jaya
    Class B
    11 March, 2012
    
    
    Female Trauma for the Consumption of Men  
    
    A Feminist Critique of Elfen Lied
    
    
    
    In 2004's Elfen Lied, multiple female characters experience trauma regarding the agency and ownership of their bodies, actions, and identities. As an examination of mental health, it offers varied insight (with more than a few cliches), but unfortunately centers that exploration around exploitative nudity and a palatable cishet everyman douchebag cousin-fucker.
    

Ok, so I cared a little, but not in class - all I could think about was how many paper cranes the discarded thesis statements could turn in to, and how Priya explored violence against women with the same fascination that she used to explore my body. The hum of our teacher's overhead projector was making me dissociate and I wanted milk tea and a swift death.

I gain a strange kind of endurance and sarcasm in school. It looks like 6am sunrises across a train station and smells like dew and coffee and I can feel graduation like a weight in the pit of my stomach. It was so close and so far away at the same time, straining against the wind like a sailor's knot. I'd had my last winter and my last fall in school and somehow I felt closer to that little girl who read all those books and was covered with paint. There was some happiness, for me, in 2004. I was 8 and when my dad let me watch Elfen Lied my mother yelled at him when I started coming home with paint-bloody hands. _She's too young for this – just look at what she's drawing_, my mother had said, and my pride was ripped up and thrown in the recycling can.

Things I'm thinking of:

  1. How Priya still wears the barette she'd put on my bedside table the night she slept over. 
  2. The stack of musty art I brought home from school, left in our basement, under my father's old bed. 
  3. All the sailor uniforms I've outgrown too quickly to miss them. 
  4. How I still felt like a child when I buried Kuro last year. 
  5. How the American television chaos of parties and beer and girls and _My dad's going on a business trip this weekend_ never seemed to come. 

Last night, I leaned back on the railing at the station, felt the weeds brush my skin, felt my skirt brush my leg, breathed cool night air. I was small, still. This body became just a body, the skin stained with old paint and another girl's hair.
    
    
    Lucy's identity also comes into play as a tool to sanitize sexuality. After surviving an attempt on her life, Lucy begins to coexist with an infantile alter - Nyu - who is very much a child in an adult's body. This relatively shitty depiction of DID functions as an excuse to, of course, show more boobs on screen – yet still justifiably have a character that's of age. This trope of "well, she's actually thousands of years old" isn't uncommon in anime, yet here it takes a more insidious guise: Nyu, existing as a result, or maybe even a _defense_, against trauma, again becomes sexually exploited for the salivating audience.
    

In the dark at the train station, I felt the monsters shrink back into the trees behind me. Maybe this was me being grown up. Maybe they were too scared to keep watching.

That was Jaya, the Concept, talking. The Jaya who stood upright, told them not to touch her. I always imagined that me would protect us. She'd be the dark leather adult letting the little me (the real me) paint at her feet, and we'd both be so, so quiet, and so, so alive.


	8. Rice Fields

I wondered about the Next Kid a lot. How I never knew who the Next Kid was, only that they were still a kid, and so different from me, and maybe with definitions of "normalcy" and "parents" that made sense. The Next Kid would start their walk at the top of the hill, at one of the houses next to ours – maybe, those rusted, paneled-together houses from the 70s would finally be knocked down; the Next Kid would shit in a flush toilet and use a front door with hinges. The garden would be so unlike what it used to be. All the old tires, abandoned cars, street signs – meticulously organized as they were – would be gone, replaced with a quaint patio and a doghouse; not so distinctly Japanese any more. Today I walked to school with the Next Kid.

She was so distinctly alive. Her, with her hypothetical red backpack and imaginary parka; me, a scarecrow; her, a different set of landmarks. The road weaves along between run-down houses, run-down greenhouses, run-down attempts at farming. It's lined with cement walls and drainage ditches and lichen and she has to stop and wait awkwardly at a corner while someone wedges their pickup truck through. We both used to play at the same playground here, packed into a corner of rusted pastel and neighbor's walls. The graveyard is near the base of the mountain, packed as dense as the city. It takes me five minutes to walk here; her - maybe she takes a left at the graveyard, a butterfly catches her eye, and with all those slight differences she's two minutes behind.

I'm thinking about this because I've done it so much I've practically carved my own path of wear in the street; and really, I've only got a few months left here. You know that phenomenon where if you do things a thousand times a few of them become art?

  * Priya tripped over this crack once. She said "Ow, fuck" and the scab healed over a few months. 
  * My mother scraped the front bumper of our sedan on this corner. "I'm so sorry," she'd said to my dad. I was laughing, and so was he. 
  * When this tree was smaller, I'd seen my grandfather's kite soaring over the rice fields even before I'd seen him. I was in a _yukata_ and the lanterns were lit early, even though it was still sunset. 

Of course, the Next Kid isn't real, except to me. She could be the piece of me that finally survives this beautiful fucking town.

"The ticket machine's broken again," said Matsumoto, leaning back against the wall with a coffee. Her rail uniform could have been ironed a few days ago and I could tell she still had at least three distinct cats.

"Good morning," I said. I swung my backpack off one arm and fished around awkwardly with cold fingers.

Matsumoto looked out through the station windows, blurred by cobwebs and our breath and the nose grease of a decade of children. The sun was a pale reflection rising up from between the sprouting rice. I felt like we both didn't want to talk about how we'd known each other for ten years, and how she'd probably be out of company most mornings after I graduated. When she was alone in that station, she'd sing to herself and talk to everyone a bit too much. 40 years old and she'd spent 40 hours a week staring out at the same beautiful fucking rice fields and the same picturesque mountain and she'd breathed the air and the rain and she was tired. After my grandfather brought his kite down she'd sold us _takoyaki_, and she'd been at the funeral, in the group that had to stand in the road and look over the cemetery wall because everyone couldn't fit. I knew the Next Kid would meet her, too, and maybe Matsumoto would find her to be better company.

It's hard to describe, but I felt like I was leaving some sort of symbolic trail behind. As if the Next Kid would be able to tell exactly where each of my footsteps were, as if the version of the town she saw could contain my version, too. It felt too worthless to throw away my version of normal without passing it on to someone, even if my version of normal was bleeding and being an emo bitch at my parents. Maybe this is all an expression of sisterhood that I never got as an only child. Maybe I should have been more grateful for everything around me, even if I was being hurt.


End file.
